Authors: James Patterson
A two-time world decathlon champion in the 1980s and 1990s, Lancer had served with and in the Queen’s Guard, which had allowed him to train full-time. At the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 he had led the decathlon after the first day of competition but had then cramped in the heat and humidity during the second day, finishing outside the top ten finishers.
Lancer had since become a motivational speaker and security consultant who often worked with Private International on big projects. He was also a member of LOCOG, the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games, and had been charged with helping to organise security for the mega-event.
‘Is it true?’ Lancer asked in a distraught voice. ‘Denton’s dead?’
‘Afraid so, Mike,’ Knight said.
Lancer’s eyes welled with tears. ‘Who would do this? Why?’
‘Looks like someone who hates the Olympics,’ Knight said. Then he described the manner of Marshall’s death, and the bloody X.
Rattled, Lancer said, ‘When do they think this happened?’
‘Shortly before midnight,’ Knight replied.
Lancer shook his head. ‘That means I saw him only two hours before his death. He was leaving the party at Tate Britain with …’ He stopped and looked at Knight in sad reappraisal.
‘Probably with my mother,’ Knight said. ‘They were engaged.’
‘Yes, I knew that you and she are related,’ Lancer said. ‘I’m so, so sorry, Peter. Does Amanda know?’
‘I’m on my way to tell her right now.’
‘You poor bastard,’ Lancer said. Then he looked off towards the police barrier. ‘Are those reporters there?’
‘A whole pack of them, and getting bigger,’ Knight said.
Lancer shook his head bitterly. ‘With all due loving respect to Denton, this is all we need with the opening ceremony tomorrow night. They’ll blast the lurid details all over the bloody world.’
‘Nothing you can do to stop that,’ Knight said. ‘But I might think about upping security on all members of the organising committee.’
Lancer made a puffing noise, and then nodded. ‘You’re right. I’d best catch a cab back to the office. Marcus is going to want to hear this in person.’
Marcus Morris, a politician who had stood down at the last election, was now chairman of the London Organising Committee.
‘My mother as well,’ Knight said and together they headed on towards Chesham Street where they thought there’d be more taxis.
Indeed, they’d just reached Chesham Street when a black cab appeared from the south across from the Diplomat Hotel. At the same time, farther away and from the north, a red cab came down the near lane. Knight hailed it.
Lancer signalled the taxi in the northbound lane, saying, ‘Give my condolences to your mother, and tell Jack I’ll be in touch sometime later today.’
Jack Morgan was the American owner of Private International. He’d been in town since the plane carrying five members of the London office had gone down in the North Sea with no survivors.
Lancer stepped off the kerb, and set off in a confident stride heading diagonally across the street while the red cab came closer.
But then, to Knight’s horror, he heard the growl of an engine and the squeal of tyres.
The black cab was accelerating, heading right at the LOCOG member.
KNIGHT REACTED ON
instinct. He leaped into the street and knocked Lancer from the cab’s path.
In the next instant, Knight sensed the black cab’s bumper less than a metre away and tried to jump in the air to avoid being hit. His feet left the ground but could not propel him out of the cab’s path. The bumper and radiator grille struck the side of his left knee and lower leg and drove on through.
The blow spun Knight into the air. His shoulders, chest and hip smashed down on the vehicle’s bonnet and his face was jammed against the windscreen. He glimpsed a split-second image of the driver. Scarf. Sunglasses. A woman?
Knight was hurled up and over the cab’s roof as if he were no more than a stuffed doll. He hit the road hard on his left side, knocking the wind out of him, and for a moment he was aware only of the sight of the black cab speeding away, the smell of car exhaust, and the blood pounding in his temples.
Then he thought: A bloody miracle, but nothing feels broken.
The red taxi screeched towards Knight and he panicked, thinking he’d be run over after all.
But it skidded into a U-turn before stopping. The driver, an old Rasta wearing a green and gold knitted cap over his dreadlocks threw open his door and jumped out.
‘Don’t move, Knight!’ Lancer yelled, running up to him. ‘You’re hurt!’
‘I’m okay,’ Knight croaked. ‘Follow that cab, Mike.’
Lancer hesitated, but Knight said, ‘She’s getting away!’
Lancer grabbed Knight under the arms and hoisted him into the back of the red cab. ‘Follow it!’ Lancer roared at the driver.
Knight held his ribs, still struggling for air as the Rasta driver took off after the black cab, which was well ahead of them by now, turning hard west along Pont Street.
‘I catch her, mon!’ the driver promised. ‘Dat crazy one tried to kill you!’
Lancer was looking back and forth between the road ahead and Knight. ‘You sure you’re okay?’
‘Banged and bruised,’ Knight grunted. ‘And she wasn’t trying to run me down, Mike. She was trying to run
you
down.’
The driver power-drifted into Pont Street, heading west. The black cab was closer now, its brake lights flashing red before it lurched in a hard right turn into Sloane Street.
The Rasta mashed the accelerator hard. They reached the intersection with Sloane Street so fast that Knight felt sure they’d actually catch up with the woman who’d just tried to kill him.
But then two more black cabs flashed past them, both heading north on Sloane Street, and the Rasta was forced to slam on his brakes and wrench the wheel so as not to hit
them
. Their cab went into a screeching skid and almost hit another car: a Metropolitan Police vehicle.
Its siren went on. So did its flashing lights.
‘No!’ Lancer yelled.
‘Every time, mon!’ the driver shouted in equal frustration as he slowed his vehicle to a stop.
Knight nodded, dazed and angry, staring through the windscreen as the taxi that had almost killed him melted into the traffic heading towards Hyde Park.
BRIGHTLY FLETCHED ARROWS
whizzed and cut through the hot mid-morning air. They struck in and around yellow bullseyes painted on large red and blue targets set up in a long line that stretched across the lime-green pitch at Lord’s Cricket Ground near Regent’s Park in central London.
Archers from six or seven countries were completing their final appointed practice rounds. Archery would be one of the first sports to be decided after the 2012 London Olympic Games opened, with competition scheduled to start mid-morning on Saturday, two days hence, with the medal ceremony to be held that very afternoon.
Which was why Karen Pope was up in the stands, watching through binoculars, boredom slackening her face.
Pope was a sports reporter for the
Sun
, a London tabloid newspaper with six million readers thanks to a tradition of aggressive bare-knuckle journalism and publishing photographs of young bare-breasted women on page three.
Pope was in her early thirties, attractive in the way that Renée Zellweger was in the film
Bridget Jones’s Diary
but too flat-chested ever to be considered for the
Sun’s
page three. Pope was also a dogged reporter, and ambitious in the extreme.
Around her neck that morning hung one of only fourteen full-access media passes granted to the
Sun
for the Olympics. Such passes had been severely limited for the British press because more than twenty thousand members of the global media would also be in London to cover the sixteen-day mega-event. The full-access passes had become almost as valuable as Olympic medals, at least to British journalists.
Pope kept thinking that she should be happy to have the pass and to be here covering the Games at all, but her efforts this morning had so far failed to yield anything truly newsworthy about archery.
She’d been looking for the South Koreans, the gold-medal favourites, but had learned that they had already finished their practice session before she arrived.
‘Bloody hell,’ she said in disgust. ‘Finch is going to kill me.’
Pope decided her best hope was to research a feature that with lively writing might somehow make the paper. But what sort? What was the angle?
Archery: Darts for the Posh?
No – there was absolutely nothing posh about archery.
Indeed, what in God’s name did she know about archery? She’d grown up in a football family. Earlier that very morning Pope had tried to explain to Finch that she’d be better off assigned to athletics or gymnastics. But her editor had reminded her in no uncertain terms that she’d only joined the paper from Manchester six weeks before and was therefore low-person on the sports desk.
‘Get me a big story and you’ll get better assignments,’ Finch had said.
Pope prodded her attention back to the archers. It struck her that they seemed so calm. It was almost as though they were in a trance over there. Not like a cricket batsman or a tennis player at all. Should she write about that? Find out how the bowmen got themselves into that state?
C’mon, she thought in annoyance, who wants to read about Zen in sports when you can look at bare boobs on page three?
Pope sighed, set down her binoculars, and shifted her position in one of the blue grandstand seats. She noticed, stuffed down into her handbag, a bundle of mail that she’d grabbed leaving the office and started going through the stack, finding various press releases and other items of zero interest.
Then she came to a thick Manila envelope with her name and title printed oddly in black and blue block letters on the front.
Pope twitched her nose as if she’d sniffed something foul. She hadn’t written anything recently to warrant a nutcase letter, most definitely not since she’d arrived in London. Every reporter worth a damn got nutcase letters. You learned to recognise them quickly. They usually came after you’d published something controversial or hinting at diabolical conspiracy.
She slit the envelope open anyway, and drew out a sheaf of ten pages attached by paper clip to a folded plain paper greeting card. She flipped the card open. There was no writing inside. But a computer chip in the card was activated by the movement and flute music began to play, weird sounds that got under her skin and made her think that someone had died.
Pope shut the card and then scanned the first page of the sheaf. She saw that it was a letter addressed to her, and that it had been typed in a dozen different fonts, which made it hard to read. But then she began to get the gist of it. She read the letter three times, her heart beating faster with every line until it felt like it was throbbing high in her throat.
She scanned the rest of the documents attached to the letter and the greeting card, and felt almost faint. She dug wildly in her bag for her phone, and called her editor.
‘Finch, it’s Pope,’ she said breathlessly when he answered. ‘Can you tell me whether Denton Marshall has been murdered?’
In a thick Cockney accent, Finch said, ‘What?
Sir
Denton Marshall?’
‘Yes, yes, the big hedge-fund guy, philanthropist, member of the organising committee,’ Pope confirmed, gathering her things and looking for the nearest exit from the cricket ground. ‘Please, Finchy, this could be huge.’
‘Hold on,’ her editor growled.
Pope had made it outside and was trying to hail a cab across from Regent’s Park when her editor finally came back on the line.
‘They’ve got the yellow tape up around Marshall’s place in Lyall Mews and the coroner’s wagon just arrived.’
Pope punched the air with her free hand and cried: ‘Finch, you’re going to have to get someone else to cover archery and dressage. The story I just caught is going to hit London like an earthquake.’
‘LANCER SAYS YOU
saved his life,’ Elaine Pottersfield said.
A paramedic prodded and poked at a wincing Knight, who was sitting on the bumper of an ambulance on the east side of Sloane Street, a few feet from the Rasta’s parked red cab.
‘I just reacted,’ Knight insisted, aching everywhere and feeling baked by the heat radiating off the pavement.
‘You put yourself in harm’s way,’ the inspector said coldly.
Knight got annoyed. ‘You said yourself I saved his life.’
‘And almost lost your own,’ she shot back. ‘Where would that have left …’ She paused. ‘The children?’
He said, ‘Let’s keep them out of this, Elaine. I’m fine. There should be footage of that cab on CCTV.’
London had 10,000 closed-circuit security cameras that rolled twenty-four hours a day, spread out across the city. A lot of them had been there since the 2005 terrorist bombings in the Tube left fifty-six people dead and seven hundred wounded.